Lavar Pope’s Rap and Politics: A Case Study of Panther, Gangster, and Hyphy Discourses in Oakland, CA (1965–2010) discovers the birth and transmutation of rap music as a megaphone of everyday Black lived experiences in Oakland, CA. Pope’s study employs novel methods to capture imagery of militancy, internal colonization, and warfare lyrics that aided in the forming Black political identity in the Bay Area and Oakland. By expanding on themes found in the study of politics, African American studies, and history, Pope guides a discussion around Black political alienation and the community’s reaction to such estrangement. Throughout Rap and Politics, Pope shines a floodlight on the failings of the American system and its stagnated pursuit to provide equity to the Black community.
The masterful way in which Pope intertwines his own lived experiences in the Bay Area rap scene with the narratives of the locale’s most dauntless revolutionaries lends much credence to the focus and motivations of the book. In Chapter 1, Pope delineates the nucleus of his argument. He contends that “by looking at rap music from particular locales during moments of local, regional, national, or international crisis, we can get a more complete understanding of race, social movements, and urban politics” (p. 4). Moreover, Pope articulates that rap music is a sonic power source of translocal Black identity and history. While employing the ring shout during days of baking under the scorching sun, through the long night of Jim Crow, and into modernity with the use of rap, Black folks have employed music as a form of everyday resistance to reclaim power from their captors. Pope suggests that this act of power reclamation is evident in the Oakland locale, given the rise of militant youth aggrieved with the government’s flippant attitude toward their plight. Specifically, these militant youth are utilizing rap music to combat “internal colonization” and the egregious acts that have followed such efforts (p. 192).
Pope, the participant observer, serves as a tour guide into familiar terrain with his scathing indictment of this form of translocal domestic colonization. He characterizes internal colonization as de jure/de facto segregation, exploitation, and domination, of marginalized communities within a state’s borders. Pope asserts that insidious conceptions such as internal colonization allow a state to enforce racial hierarchy while allowing for maintaining the status quo. Eventually, oppressed groups will develop and deploy weapons of the weak to combat the oppression of exploitative systems.
Being forced into action by the omnipresent policing that faces Black Americans, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense (BPPSD) sprung onto the scene in Oakland to regain control over their community. In Chapter 2, Pope effortlessly depicts the mosaic of Panther activity in Oakland. Seen through a Black nationalist’s lens, the BPPSD allowed space for common Black folk to challenge the dominate/subordinate paradigm that exists in America and ultimately provided an international platform from which to air their grievances. In the section entitled, “Factors and Influences,” Pope exposes how the BPPSD was a reaction to the unmet needs, wants, desires, and promises of opportunity, for the Black community. Forced to fight over mere floor scraps, many Blacks in Oakland were subject to the politics of deprivation, and the BPPSD finally allowed the Black citizens a militant backing to help fight for a seat at the table. Given the group’s international standing, members could articulate how the “American dream” had turned into an urban nightmare for inner-city Black people. Essentially declaring sovereignty from tyrannical governments known for mistreating Black people across the diaspora, the BPPSD began to churn out militant and antistate literature. Such strident literary attacks on the government influenced the Oakland sound by fostering a platform of empowerment. The rappers in Oakland began to feel as if they could fully put their feelings, emotions, and grievances over unmet needs on their tracks. Unfortunately, given some administrative stumbles and COINTELPRO infiltration, the BPPSD ceased to exist, yet the insatiable appetite for freedom and apparent power void remained.
As a result of state-sanctioned attacks on the BPPSD, a leadership vacuum existed on the streets of Oakland. In Chapter 3, “The Gangster Discourses,” Pope masterfully depicts the rise of the gangster aesthetic in the Oakland locale. He pinpoints the spawning of the Oakland sound, influenced by the work of the Panthers; gangsters, bastards of the Black Panther Party, began to use their voices in another way to reclaim their streets from their colonizers, by rap music. Pope contends that “the rapper is able to point out a discrepancy between the promises of equality in America and the reality that he is faced with on a day-to-day basis” and, as such, serves as a type of street historian who aids in the conveyance of Black identity to a regional, national, or international audience (p. 171). As Oakland’s gangster era marched on, a local rapper rose to global prominence. Pope highlights the impact of the son of two Black Panthers, Tupac Shakur, on the Oakland sound. Undoubtedly, Shakur became a street prophet with his charismatic flow and authoritative lyrics. Tupac worked valiantly up until his death to share the unfortunate circumstances that faced countless Black folks in America. Tupac’s premature death ushered in a new epoch in Oakland sound.
After panning over the Panther and gangster periods of Oakland’s sound development, and subsequent ideological refinement, Pope escorts us to the most recent mutation in Oakland’s rap music, hyphy rap. A reaction to the state power dynamics and having been influenced by the Black militant counterculture that came before, hyphy rappers gave Oakland another iteration of its unique sound. Contemporarily, hyphy rappers continue carrying the Oakland critique of the American nightmare. Underground artists continue to serve as “local discourse carriers” who seek to culturally expose the underpinnings of the attack on Black life by White patriarchal, capitalistic society (p. 258). As found in the previous iterations of Oakland’s sound, rap allows Black people to erect sonic safe spaces where they can produce and share their innermost feelings about the Black condition to all who will listen.
Overall, Pope argues that throughout the various stages of Oakland’s sound development, ideological distillation occurred based upon the literary and vocal work of the previous era’s leading actors and the power voids left in their stead. Rap and Politics is explanatory, absorbable, and engaging to the academy and the broader reading public alike. Pope’s interdisciplinary approach communicates the formation of Oakland’s music and centers this city’s importance to Black music and politics. Throughout the book, Pope confronts the ideological paradigms entrenched in quotidian Black American life. Pope rebuilds and fortifies the boundaries of Black politics and music by demanding recognition of Oakland as an epicenter and incubator of Hip Hop culture.
